


Psalm 88

by doreah



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Angst, Biblical Scripture References (Abrahamic Religions), Don’t copy to another site, Episode: s03e10 Witness, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Masturbation, Missing Scene, Non-Graphic Smut, Religious Guilt, Season/Series 03, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-13 01:53:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20166190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doreah/pseuds/doreah
Summary: There's sin, and then there'sthis.





	Psalm 88

**Author's Note:**

> “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” ― C.S. Lewis

When Serena touches herself that night, alone in the darkness of the rented condo bedroom overlooking a city that once was her home, her fingers take on a life of their own. It's an ultimately futile exercise, she already knows. All this longing and pent up rage, the desire, they will come out at once with the flood of a guilt-laced climax and the relief will be merely momentary. This is hardly new, nor are the visions that swarm behind her eyelids, all the pink and rose hues of flushed skin and swollen lips. Of sharp, cold blue eyes, the veil of blonde hair, tangled and wild. The hatred. 

_ Thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth._

There's nothing quite so frustrating as those moments and the knowledge that no matter what happens, inevitably, her insistent hunger will eventually overwhelm her loathing. She can walk up, head held high and shoulders squared, eyes narrowed, always acutely prepared for a fight, but all it takes is a smirk, or an arched eyebrow, or in this particular case, a few words pushed out in a tone she's never heard before. Light, yet aware, like a secret shared, an inside joke, or a lover's promise. Like June does when it's only the two of them, alone. 

Arrogant. 

Incorrigible. 

Friendly, even, if she wants to delude herself further. 

(She won't dare read anymore into it, despite the way her chest pulls desperately towards the shameful and impossible.) 

So instead, while her husband and Commander Winslow are downstairs in the lobby bar, her hand slips up underneath her teal skirt, into her modest underwear, and skims over the dampness between her legs. It only takes a thought really, a momentary lapse of control, a fleeting fantastical lust. Absurd, honestly. 

_ How's your arm?_

Why did that bring a wave of something indescribable up her spine? Why did that silly phrase evoke such a reaction that she had to chew the inside of her lip to halt the progress of further betrayal by her body? Such a stupid thing to say, really. But something about how June smiled, the way her voice took on an air of coyness—almost coquettish, how Serena knew those words were for her to understand and her alone. Despite being in a sea of red and white, with Commanders and Aunts buzzing around her like blowflies, June said _ that_. And it was meant for nobody else at all. 

A gift. A condemnation. A signal, perhaps. _When I looked for good, then evil came unto me_.

The quiet _ thank you _ may have been enough, but that stupid question sealed it. Serena felt it immediately. It was a silver bullet in her gut, like before when she stood in front of a screaming crowd, thirsting for blood. 

_ How’s your arm? _ A deafening bang against her eardrums. Shots fired in the chaos. It belied a wound, ripped wide open in front of a sea of people who hate her, except this time, every nerve tingled and quivered lower, and the searing pain remained the same. 

June’s impish grin, the way her eyes crinkled, the dimple in the softness of her cheeks. 

She's felt that soft skin between her hands, run a palm over the smooth swell, and it lingers still. In her dreams, unbidden and unwanted, she feels the press of her lips, and fingertips, against June’s face. There's so much more she sees alone in the dark during these solitary nightmares, and she knows that it’s also what her husband sees in his own perverse dreams. The only difference is his are real memories. He's had her, in some way, in many ways. But Serena? She has grasped at nothing but ghosts and vivid imaginings, and those never fill the emptiness. She's left pathetically pining for just a little more, or anything at all. A touch, a word, a glance, even merely a sigh. 

There are instances when she can hear what June would sound like, she imagines how June would look, nestled between her legs with blonde hair spilling over her thighs. Her fingers become puppets of June, and only her. 

She slides her finger through her slick folds and pretends it's somebody else touching her now. 

Sometimes, and only occasionally, Serena will force the image of her husband into her mind instead—out of guilt perhaps, or a need to convince herself she isn’t beyond salvation. His hands, rough and large, his body, heavy and hairy, his voice and breath hot and grating, moaning so guttural that it becomes demonic almost, his weight suffocating, like a very slow murder. She can no longer come when she thinks about him. The fury at herself and the shame of her own sinful, disgusting nature is enough to kill the covetous throb for a while, maybe a day, maybe a week or more. It all depends on how often she sees June, or hears her name, or thinks about her. 

But, in times like this, if she doesn't allow Fred into her mind, the arousal remains ardent and strong. 

It's only June and a pulse of wetness coats her fingers at the thought. 

A more wretched creature does not exist, she knows. There's sin, and then there's _ this_. It's beyond the scope of the Devil's deeds, rooted entirely in Hell itself. With that, she's beyond redemption now and no God she's ever learned of could forgive this abhorrent weakness, her lack of control over her own body, and worse, mind. She is the Judas kiss of her own life. 

Sinners can be saved. 

Serena knows she can't be. 

Not anymore. Not as she’s possessed by Satan and touches herself, rhythmically rubbing desperate strokes against her clit, dreaming only of another woman's moans, and lips, and touch, and smell. Repugnant, of course, but utterly impossible to erase from her fantasies, and she has tried, so hard. Deep evil. There is no one in her life to tell her differently, and June herself is so far away. 

She's never been that close to June, not truly and not like that. _ Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; _Not close enough to be able to feel her the way Nick has, the way her husband in Canada has, the way Fred has, the way countless men undoubtedly have. She could crawl in June's bed under the cover of night, slither her hands through the bedsheets and all over her body, but that's not intimacy. It just made the pain even more severe, painting it instead as a mere mockery of the communion she craves. 

June may be a fallen woman, but not buried. She's still accessible to the Lord. She's able to be saved from sin because her crimes are forgivable. Isn't that what her sacrifice is for? 

Prior to and after this ungodly act, Serena rehearses the passages of scripture that condemn her very existence. She knows what God wants of her, and how she has failed. Once, far before this, she considered herself strong enough for it all: for everything Gilead and the Lord could throw at her. Her spine remained rigid, her eyes cold and empty, and her heart sealed up tightly through it all. But inside? She was and is still weak. Much too weak for any grace to be bestowed. 

Every time she can feel that distinctive pressure and warmth building between her legs, as her fingers move more eagerly and she grows even wetter, and all she can think of is June, she hates herself that little bit more, and curses God for this punishment, for her uncontrollable, insatiable wanting. 

All she does is _ want_. 

Every breath, every day is soaked with it, the push and pull of everything she can’t have, in every aspect of life. The chasm is so wide inside her chest, a black hole of lechery, perversion, and a gluttonous appetite for anything to fill the void. She’s tried all the usual remedies of marriage, religion, politics, career, children, and even so has remained damned and wanting for something more. The only thing that even came close was the promise of children, but even then, they were mere Band-Aids. Temporary. Prone to falling off in a matter of time, shriveled, filthy, and useless. Insufficient to appease the yawning cavity of disgrace, and the debt of knowing she can never appease herself nor God. She’ll never be welcomed into His grace ever again, not as long as she’s as unshakably selfish as this.

So, she prays and it falls upon deaf ears time after time, _Incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles._

There's contempt for herself, a guilt that invades her body, and humiliation she can’t shake free of every single time June enters her thoughts in this way. So, when she’s able, she distorts the shame into furor, or tampers it into frigidity. She’s good at that. Her mother has taught her so much over the years. 

Right now however, her arm burns. The tight teal-blue fabric chafes against the slowly healing scalpel wound with every tiny movement but it doesn’t stop her. 

_ How’s your arm? _ God, it fucking _ kills_. The throbbing reminds her of June with every aching second. 

It fucks her up. 

It turns her on. 

She pictures June, flushed pink and sweating, naked above her. Sometimes the look in her eyes is just like that berserk glare from the hospital, like she’s ready to kill, but more often than not, there’s an upturned smirk, knowing eyes like she can see right through her soul. It makes Serena feel both off-balance and relieved that someone finally can. 

Her breathing grows shallower and more frantic, small moans escaping as her fingers work away. With her eyes squeezed shut, she’s allowed to wander through the obscene mirages of everything she can never have. 

Blood rushes around her body, the pulse of wanton need permeates every inch but settles precisely between her legs. She remembers how June smells, and feels, and sounds. She’s had her face buried against her waist, in the crook of her neck, and her skin is faintly musky but never floral or fragrant—not in Gilead. Her scent is intense like she is. Earthy. A tether of sinew and distant reason. The taste of June’s skin with that dusting of salt and hard soap tingles on her tongue as if it was a familiar experience and not just the exaggerations of vague memory. Maybe she tastes different now, maybe she has a different flavour if Serena was ever able to kiss her elsewhere. Hands and foreheads are only the starting blocks of a different sort of race. 

Serena knows too well what yearning feels like, how the keening and desperation quiver through her limbs when she imagines the way June really tastes. 

An echo bounces off her eardrums, and it’s a moan. 

_ Serena_. 

There’s a peculiar way June whispers her name that tears apart the walls, rips out the heart of the beast. Serena knows she could easily fall to her knees with little so much as a whisper said in just that particular way. 

Her limbs shudder at the thought of such divine worship. Her mind shudders at the blasphemy. 

She answers the apparition with an echoing and stifled cry of her own into the heavy silence of this stranger’s borrowed bedroom, in the bed she is meant to share with Fred later in the night. 

"June." 

Oh, God. _ June_. One and the same. 

She tries so very hard never to use that name aloud, to give it the power it demands of her. It's a name that leeches truth, soaks into her skin like gasoline, and tries to light the match. Serena's always found the sound of a match sticking flint or the metallic flick of a lighter to cause a rush of excitement even before she's inhales that first drag of her cigarette. The burning, clawing sort of desire, the shuddering anticipation of that coming rush, is exactly how saying June's name feels. 

They both learned long ago how intimate and thus how destructive names can be. Only twice has she ever wielded it against June: once for gain, and once out of concern. The continued formality of Gilead's patronymics is merely a weapon intended to wound, or distance, or a mask, and Serena needs all three like she needs water. It's such a habit, and June's real name is too much temptation. 

So she practices name again on her lips in tandem with the pressure of her fingers, and all she can hear is the pathetic needy mewling of a wounded animal. Yet the ability to say it sends sparks, and a heavily burgeoning wave through her abdomen. Fuck, it feels good. It's almost as if it's real. 

The building intensity doesn't abate, nor should it with the frantic stroking and the hard breathing, panting, that her body is doing of its own treacherous accord. 

And then the next wave hits. Too hard, perhaps, but she rides her own hand feverishly, with June's name stuck to the back of her tongue like an invocation, until she can’t even tell where reality ends and her nightmare begins, mixing into a sticky haze of everything she wants and will never have. Her body rushes with fear and an arching panic, piercing the darkness yet submerging her in it. A touch of lips, of fingers, a brush of skin on skin, a scalpel slipping smoothly through thin flesh.

_Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves, _she thinks, choking on her own gasping breath. And it all ends almost as abruptly as it began, with murmurs of dread and gluttony. 

Sometimes, like this time, she cries after she comes. Mostly because she feels sorry for herself, such a lonely and pitiful beast abandoned by God, and disgust for her unnatural cravings. But more so, she cries because it doesn’t feel wrong to imagine June’s mouth on her skin, her hands on her body, her own tongue diving deeply into wet warmth, and there’s no way to reconcile that with what she knows of the Bible or Gilead. 

Her punishment comes in the form of isolation from herself, and her God, and her child that has never been hers; overwhelmed with unnerving desire that refuses to recede. Tears are simple things, and the only sort of release she can have without guilt in her heart. There is a caving in of everything, and if science were still allowed beyond childbirth, Serena knows she and a dying star are one and the same, the stifling gravity of loss sucking in everything, tearing apart the world around her into tiny pieces. _Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness._ Nonexistence seems such a more desirable state of being during times like these, if it is being at all. 

At least then she wouldn’t be quietly crying alone with the smell of only herself coating her fingers and a cold empty bed surrounding her once again. 

_ Forsaken_, she supposes. The self pity rears up on its hind legs, a roar coming from the blackness beyond. _ Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear. A woman forsaken and grieved in spirit_. 

She wonders, at times like these, when her body is coming down and the cold sweat is drying on her forehead, if it's even June that she sees, or merely a symbol of her own self hate, because who better to embody that, animate it, to personify it than June. She's not being touched and kissed and loved by the spectre of lust for a woman, but rather she's getting fucked by her own worst self, maliciously and incessantly. When she gazes into the mirror, it's a god and a devil—_it's June—_she sees. Pure loathing. Irredeemable and unsalvageable. The tears that sneak across her cheeks after she comes, they're for herself and the mire that she can’t escape. 

The hate aims to possess her, own her, to ruin her, and it wears red, has icy blue eyes and blonde hair, and whispers her name over and over like a lover's curse. Yet, her heart flutters, unbidden and unwanted all the same. It denies that voice three times, it doubts, and it craves. Surely, it is insanity manifest. 

Her arm continues to throb along the red and aching slice, hidden beneath the blue of her prison uniform. That painful twinge is payback for this little interlude of sin and temporary reprieve. Of everything she wants and will never have. Of June; not the demon or the saint, just the woman always surrounding her and filling her emptiness. She longs to care openly, as if maybe that could resolve all the tension, but she is still trapped by her own self-pity.

_ Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness._

This time her own turbid and morose mind begs the question: how’s your arm? 

_ It feels like salvation_, she longs to say but stays silent once again. Instead, she shifts her skirt back into place, runs a hand lightly over her tightly wound bun, and moves towards the bathroom to clean herself up. The men will return shortly, and once again, she’ll bring the mask down over her face and cower inside herself, as she thinks of her own selfish appeasement, of any possible way to soothe the pain and emptiness. 

_ Thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation. _

**Author's Note:**

> Psalm 88 is often considered the most dismal of all chapters in the Bible, even more so than many of the Lamentations. It "stands alone in all the Psalter for the unrelieved gloom, the hopeless sorrow of its tone. Even the very saddest of the others, and the Lamentations themselves, admit some variations of key, some strains of hopefulness; here only all is darkness to the close."
> 
> 88  
O lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee:  
2 Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry;  
3 For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.  
4 I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength:  
5 Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand.  
6 Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.  
7 Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. Selah.  
8 Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.  
9 Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction: Lord, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee.  
10 Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? Selah.  
11 Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction?  
12 Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?  
13 But unto thee have I cried, O Lord; and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee.  
14 Lord, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me?  
15 I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up: while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted.  
16 Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off.  
17 They came round about me daily like water; they compassed me about together.  
18 Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.
> 
> https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/matthew-henry-complete/psalms/88.html
> 
> (I also used some lines from Job 30 (which is also a lamentation of loss) and Isaiah 54 (which is a book of prophecies).)


End file.
